


Stolen Souls

by JaneTurenne



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 20:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1009487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTurenne/pseuds/JaneTurenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Narvin only ever owns one photograph of Leela.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stolen Souls

**Author's Note:**

> (Set post-S6, but written before its release, and containing no spoilers)

In his memory, she smiles.

Narvin keeps the photo anyway, no matter how inadequate it may be.  Grainy surveillance footage, many-times folded--and worse, she isn't smiling on the page.  But he keeps it anyway, because it is the only one he has ever had, and he needs it more than ever now.

Souls, she told him once, as she lay with her head on his chest, her hair tickling his nose.  Her people believed that cameras stole souls.  He scoffed at the time, frustrated by her reluctance to allow him the gift of her image.  Now he hopes it is true.  He would like to carry a piece of her soul, even if it is stolen, robbed from her without consent.  He would like to hold a captive fragment of his wild winged creature, forever flinging herself against the bars. _  
_

He carries the photograph in his pocket at first.  Then comes the time when he is captured, and searched, and it is taken from him.  He is glad that it is not on his person when they torture him, because the blood would stain her face, and he would rather lose the blood than her.  But after, once he has engineered his own escape, when he is forced to kill his way through an extra dozen Ogrons just to retrieve the photo on his way out--after that, he takes better precautions.  

He takes to sewing it into the lining of his clothes, which is inconvenient.  It requires tearing up seams every time he needs to see her.  And he needs to see her always, and cannot manage any other way.

He will not let himself forget her face.  But he forgets, for a time, what it was like to see her smile.

The war goes badly.  It was always going badly.  The war ends.  It was always ending.  But Narvin lives, which is bewildering and hateful.  Gallifrey's corpse is sealed in a mausoleum that he cannot ever visit, and he wants to sink into that grave with his people and never breathe again.  

But there is a photograph sewn into his jacket, and he hates the hope it gives him.  Because he cannot be certain, however certain he feels.  He cannot  _know_ that she is dead, too, like everyone else.  And he cannot lay down his bones until he is certain that their dust will mix with hers.

She is the tracker, the huntress.  He is neither.  He is an aimless man with a photograph of a woman who must be nothing like this, anymore--who must be as unrecognizable as his own reflection in the mirror--who must be grown old, as he is grown old--who disappeared from a battlefield and who, by any sensible measure,  _must_ be dead--but he is dead, and yet he goes on breathing, and goes on showing her picture to anyone who will look, and asking, _have you seen her_ _, do you know her, she is like this, except she smiles._

And one day, in an alley, there is a knife on his neck.

"I have nothing for you to take," he says.  "Nothing left to take."

"You have been showing people a photograph," says the voice, "of a woman."

"Not a photograph," he says.  "A soul."

And the knife falls, and he does not recognize it, any more than he did the voice.  But he has kept her face, and when she turns him around, he knows it--behind his own tears and hers, beneath the wrinkles and the grey-streaked hair, and even when he can no longer see her because their legs cannot support them and their arms are busy touching, holding, clinging, confirming, and their eyes can no longer see--still he knows her face.

In an alleyway, forgotten on the ground, are left a fallen knife and a photograph worn almost to pieces.  And in Narvin's memory, once again, Leela smiles.


End file.
